Table Of ContentDispossession:
The Performative
in the Political
Dispossession:
The Performative
in the Political
Conversations with
Athena Athanasiou
Judith Butler
polity
Copyright © Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou 2013
The right of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou to be identifi ed as
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First published in 2013 by Polity Press
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with
dispossession 1
2 The logic of dispossession and the matter
of the human (after the critique of
metaphysics of substance) 10
3 A caveat about the “primacy of economy” 38
4 Sexual dispossessions 44
5 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond
themselves 55
6 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back
to the violence of recognition 64
7 Recognition and survival, or surviving
recognition 75
8 Relationality as self-dispossession 92
9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable
performativity 97
10 Responsiveness as responsibility 104
11 Ex-propriating the performative 126
v
Contents
12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities
named and renamed 131
13 The political promise of the performative 140
14 The governmentality of “crisis” and its
resistances 149
15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing
and owning 158
16 Trans-border affective foreclosures and
state racism 164
17 Public grievability and the politics of
memorialization 173
18 The political affects of plural performativity 176
19 Conundrums of solidarity 184
20 The university, the humanities, and the
book bloc 188
21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure 193
Notes 198
Index 205
vi
Preface
The two of us met in Athens, Greece, in December
2009, when Judith gave the Nicos Poulantzas Memorial
Lecture for the Poulantzas Institute, affi liated with
SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), and spoke for
the Department of Social Anthropology at the Panteion
University, where Athena is a professor. We began a
conversation on politics, theory, embodiment, and new
formations of left politics, focused at fi rst on the ques-
tion of how older left politics might respond to newer
feminist and queer concerns with resisting precarity.
Our fi rst conversation (which was published in Greek),
“Questioning the Normative, Reconfi guring the Possi-
ble: Feminism, Queer Politics and the Radical Left,”
appeared in the volume Performativity and Precarity:
Judith Butler in Athens (Athens: nissos, 2011).1
Athena’s own work focuses on feminist theory
and radical social thought, bringing perspectives on the
work of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault to critically
consider critically relations between masculinism, tech-
nology, and the human. Athena’s volume, co-edited with
vii
Preface
Elena Tzelepis, Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and
the “Greeks” (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), moves from
tropes derived from classical Greek myth to contem-
porary transnational and postcolonial contexts of cor-
poreal and critical practices. She has published a book
in Greek called Life at the Limit: Essays on the Body,
Gender, and Biopolitics (Athens: Ekkremes, 2007),2
in which she offers a post-human and post-Lacanian
psychoanalytic account of technology, difference,
embodiment, and bodies of knowledge, focusing on
how they inform the contemporary social organization
of livability, desire, and gendered and sexual subjectiv-
ity. She has also written a book (Crisis as a “State
of Exception”: Critiques and Resistances, Athens:
Savvalas, 2012)3 on the bodily dimensions of the Greek
debt crisis; in it she addresses the indefi nite state of
exception as an instance of neoliberal governmental
rationality conducted in the name of the economic
emergency and involving forces of racialization and
feminization that fundamentally structure the condition
of “becoming precarious.” Her overall work focuses on
forms of queer deconstruction and feminist modes of
performative politics, including non-violent public dem-
onstrations of grieving and resistance to contemporary
regimes of biopolitics, such as the work of the transna-
tional, antimilitaristic, feminist movement Women in
Black. In considering concrete manifestations of subver-
sive gender performativity, Athena has been inspired by
Judith’s philosophical work on ethics and politics,
gender and queer performativity, corporeality, language,
normative violence and violence of derealization, the
vulnerability of human life and the question of what
makes for a livable life. And Judith has been challenged
viii
